Johnston at the 2017 Sundance premiere of A Ghost Story. (L to R) Toby Halbrooks, David Lowery, and James M. It’s fitting that David’s an avid runner, a kind of metaphor for his non-stop, globetrotting work style.īut he stays deeply connected with his longtime creative partners no matter where he is-and Frame.io has played a big role in that over the course of his last several films, beginning with A Ghost Story in 2017. “I’ve had my time with it and it’s time to cast it out into the world and let other people do what they will with it.” Geographic independence “Once I finish a film, I’ll have watched it between 20 and 40 times, so I have no desire to watch it again,” he says. Six months later, he was in Ireland, prepping for principal photography.Īlways one to keep moving forward, as David completes each film he immediately embraces new challenges and new ideas. Those questions resonated with him at that stage of his life, and he completed the script in only two weeks. “It asks lots of questions about the value of one’s life, what matters. I ran through a list of potential sources and remembered reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in my freshman year in college,” he says. “I was going through some old boxes and found my action figures from the Ron Howard film Willow (written by Lucas) and thought about how much fun it would be to make a Willow-style fantasy adventure. Once again, George Lucas provided inspiration. Not a fast writer by nature, he’d wanted to challenge himself to write something quickly, from start to finish. The idea for The Green Knight came to David when he was working on another screenplay and had hit pause on it.

Every film demarcates a different part of my life.” My work just naturally reflects what’s troubling me or something I’m curious about. “I have things in my life that I’m dealing with or philosophical quandaries that are bubbling beneath the surface. “I never choose a question or a theme when I set out to write a film or come up with an idea for a new project,” David says. “My work just naturally reflects what’s troubling me or something I’m curious about.” Obviously, he’s genre-agnostic, drawing inspiration from a wide variety of influences and experiences. Since then, he’s earned numerous awards and accolades for such films as Pete’s Dragon, A Ghost Story, and The Old Man and the Gun, as well as a nomination for the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Ain’t Them Bodies Saints in 2013. Nick, premiered at South by Southwest in 2009, and earned him the Texas Filmmaker Award at the AFI Dallas International Film Festival that year.

“The way that the movies get to the screen can only get better.” David Lowery, writer, director, and editor of The Green Knight.Īfter moving to Texas (which he still calls home), he completed his first short at age seven. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, but I had read some books about how movies were made and I was like, ‘I think I probably will.’ That was it, and I’ve had a one-track mind ever since,” David says. “I was on a playground with my friend, on a swing set, and we were talking about Star Wars as we often did, and I asked him if he ever thought he might make a movie. Now in production on Disney’s upcoming Peter Pan & Wendy, David very generously talked to us about his many creative processes and pursuits in this installment of Made in Frame.ĭavid’s road has been lengthy, but only because he decided on his career path at the age of seven. His most recent feature, The Green Knight (on which he wore all of the hats), took him to Ireland for principal photography, with VFX by Weta Digital in New Zealand and Lucky Post in Dallas, and sound mixing at Skywalker Sound north of San Francisco. As a creative who juggles multiple projects while traveling to points all across the globe, he’s always in motion. David Lowery wears a lot of hats-director, writer, editor, producer.

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